1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a rapidly reconfigurable wavelength multiplexing device. It more particularly applies to the transmission of data in an optical network, with optical switching in which a wavelength is associated with data in order to then switch them to the optical memories by filtering (using a switching device, e.g. of the Asynchronous Transfer Mode or ATM type). It is then possible to store data at different wavelengths on the same physical support.
The present device makes it possible to allocate a particular wavelength to the data to be stored.
2. Description of the Related Art
In optical networks, optical multiplexing makes it possible to increase the transmission capacity of a fibre optic link by superimposing on the same optical fibre several channels, each using a particular wavelength.
It is known that optical multiplexing volume devices such as a fibre coupler, a network multiplexer or an interference filter multiplexer are fixed once and for all in their initial configuration or are only reconfigurable very slowly compared with the information transmission needs. In other words, the distribution of different wavelengths can only be modified with difficulty or slowly.
In certain known networks, laser diodes are modulated so as to emit a modulated light signal. In this case, the sending of the same information on all or part of the channels is problematical. It is either necessary to reserve a common channel to all the receivers, which involve greater equipment complexity, or all the beams of different wavelength have to be identically modulated, which implies the same message being repeated the same number of times as there are wavelengths.